Literary theory

About: Literary theory is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5530 publications have been published within this topic receiving 116396 citations. The topic is also known as: Literary theory.

The language of new media

Abstract: "In this book Lev Manovich offers the first systematic and rigorous theory of new media. He places new media within the histories of visual and media cultures of the last few centuries. He discusses new media's reliance on conventions of old media, such as the rectangular frame and mobile camera, and shows how new media works create the illusion of reality, address the viewer, and represent space. He also analyzes categories and forms unique to new media, such as interface and database. Manovich uses concepts from film theory, art history, literary theory, and computer science and also develops new theoretical constructs, such as cultural interface, spatial montage, and cinegratography. The theory and history of cinema play a particularly important role in the book. Among other topics, Manovich discusses parallels between the histories of cinema and of new media, digital cinema, screen and montage in cinema and in new media, and historical ties between avant-garde film and new media." -- Publisher's website.

On the Postcolony

Abstract: Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of post colonial studies writing today. In "On the Postcolony" he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of post colonial theory. This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays - his first book to be published in English - develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony', in which he developed his notion of the 'banality of power' in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity - violence, wonder, and laughter - to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century. This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and post colonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Abstract: Since its initial publication in 1973, Hayden White's Metahistory has remained an essential book for understanding the nature of historical writing. In this classic work, White argues that a deep structural content lies beyond the surface level of historical texts. This latent poetic and linguistic content - which White dubs the "metahistorical element" - essentially serves as a paradigm for what an "appropriate" historical explanation should be. To support his thesis, White analyzes the complex writing styles of historians like Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, and Burckhardt, and philosophers of history such as Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Croce. The first work in the history of historiography to concentrate on historical writing as writing, Metahistory sets out to deprive history of its status as a bedrock of factual truth, to redeem narrative as the substance of historicality, and to identify the extent to which any distinction between history and ideology on the basis of the presumed scientificity of the former is spurious. This fortieth-anniversary edition includes a new preface in which White explains his motivation for writing Metahistory and discusses how reactions to the book informed his later writing. In a new foreword, Michael S. Roth, a former student of White's and the current president of Wesleyan University, reflects on the significance of the book across a broad range of fields, including history, literary theory, and philosophy. This book will be of interest to anyone-in any discipline-who takes the past as a serious object of study.

Margins of philosophy

Abstract: "In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his devoted, relentless dismantling of the philosophical tradition, the tradition of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger each dealt with in one or more of the essays. There are essays too on linguistics (Saussure, Benveniste, Austin) and on the nature of metaphor ("White Mythology"), the latter with important implications for literary theory. Derrida is fully in control of a dazzling stylistic register in this book a source of true illumination for those prepared to follow his arduous path. Bass is a superb translator and annotator. His notes on the multilingual allusions and puns are a great service." Alexander Gelley, "Library Journal""

The Place of Story in the Study of Teaching and Teacher Education

Abstract: ith increasing frequency over the past several years we, as members of a community of investigator-practitioners, have been telling stories about teaching and teacher education rather than simply reporting correlation coefficients or generating lists of findings. This trend has been upsetting to some who mourn the loss of quantitative precision and, they would argue, scientific rigor. For many of us, however, these stories capture, more than scores or mathematical formulae ever can, the richness and indeterminacy of our experiences as teachers and the complexity of our understandings of what teaching is and how others can be prepared to engage in this profession. It is not altogether surprising, then, that this attraction to stories has evolved into an explicit attempt to use the literatures on "story" or "narrative" to define both the method and the object of inquiry in teaching and teacher education. Story has become, in other words, more than simply a rhetorical device for expressing sentiments about teachers or candidates for the teaching profession. It is now, rather, a central focus for conducting research in the field. We are certainly not alone in giving formal attention to story. This term, like others from linguistics and literary theory (e.g., discourse, text, deconstruction), has caught on with considerable enthusiasm throughout the intellectual world and is beginning to appear in widely different contexts. In psychology, for example, Bruner (1985) speaks of a narrative mode of thought, and Sarbin (1986) proposes story as a "root metaphor" for the study of human conduct. Within education, scholars such as Cole and Knowles (1992); Clandinin and Connelly (1992); Elbaz (1991); Grossman (1987); Gudmundsdottir (1991); Hollingsworth (in press); and Richert (1990) have recently made story a central element in their analyses of teachers' knowledge. As Mitchell (1981) noted as early as 1981, "The study of narrative is no longer the province of literary specialists or folklorists ... but has now become a positive source of insight for all branches of human and natural science" (p. ix). Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the literatures on story soon realizes, however, that these are quite turbulent intellectual waters and quickly abandons the expectation of safe passage toward the resolution, once and for all, of the many puzzles and dilemmas we face in advancing our knowledge of teaching. Much needs to be learned about the nature of story and its value to our common enterprise, and about the wide range of purposes, approaches, and claims made by those who have adopted story as a central analytical framework. What does story capture and what does it leave out? How does this notion fit within the emerging sense of the nature of teaching and what it means to educate teachers? These and many other critical questions need to be faced if story is to become more than a loose metaphor for everything from a paradigm or worldview to a technique for bringing home a point in a lecture on a Thursday afternoon. Given both the excitement story has generated and the many issues this movement has brought to the fore, it seems appropriate to provide an analysis of the place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education. My overall purpose here is to begin the process of clarifying the arguments, mapping the intellectual terrain, and casting light on the major issues we need to consider in incorporating story into our research activities. I have no illusions that this discus-